Cincinnati chili

Cincinnati chili (or Cincinnati-style chili) is a Mediterranean-spiced meat sauce used as a topping for spaghetti or hot dogs ("coneys"). Both dishes were developed by immigrant restaurateurs in the 1920s. Its name evokes comparison to chili con carne, but the two are dissimilar in consistency, flavor, and serving method; Cincinnati chili more closely resembles Greek pasta sauces and spiced-meat hot dog topping sauces seen in other parts of the United States.

Ingredients include ground beef, water or stock, tomato paste, spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, cumin, chili powder, and bay leaf in a soupy consistency. The dish does not contain chocolate, despite popular myth to the contrary. Customary toppings include cheddar cheese, onions, and beans; specific combinations of toppings are known as "ways". The most popular order is a "three-way", which adds shredded cheese to the chili-topped spaghetti (a "two-way"), while a "four-way" or "five-way" adds onions or beans before topping with the cheese. Ways are often served with oyster crackers and a mild hot sauce. Cincinnati chili is almost never served or eaten by the bowl.

While served in many local restaurants, it is most often associated with the over 250 independent and chain "chili parlors" (restaurants specializing in Cincinnati chili) found throughout greater Cincinnati with franchise locations throughout Ohio and in Northern Kentucky, Indiana, Florida, and the Middle East.

The dish is the Cincinnati area's best-known regional food. In 2000, one local chili parlor was named an America's Classic by the James Beard Foundation, and in 2013, Smithsonian named the same chili parlor one of the "20 Most Iconic Food Destinations in America".

Cincinnati chili originated with immigrant restaurateurs who were trying to expand their customer base by moving beyond narrowly ethnic styles of cuisine. Tom and John Kiradjieff emigrated from the village of Hrupishta (present-day Argos Orestiko, Greece), fleeing ethnic rivalries and bigotry in the fallout from the Balkan Wars and World War I, in 1921. They began serving a "stew with traditional Mediterranean spices" as a topping for hot dogs which they called "coneys" in 1922 at their hot dog stand located next to a burlesque theater called the Empress, which they named their business after.

Tom Kiradjieff used the sauce to modify a traditional dish, speculated to have been pastitsio, moussaka or saltsa kima to come up with a dish he called "chili spaghetti." He first developed a recipe calling for the spaghetti to be cooked in the chili but changed his method in response to customer requests and began serving the sauce as a topping, eventually adding grated cheese as a topping for both the chili spaghetti and the coneys, also in response to customer requests.

To make ordering more efficient, the brothers created the "way" system of ordering. The style has since been copied and modified by many other restaurant proprietors, often Greek and Macedonian immigrants who had worked at Empress restaurants before leaving to open their own chili parlors, often following the business model to the point of locating their restaurants adjacent to theaters.

Empress was the largest chili parlor chain in Cincinnati until 1949, when a former Empress employee and Greek immigrant, Nicholas Lambrinides, started Skyline Chili. In 1965, four brothers named Daoud, immigrants from Jordan, bought a restaurant called Hamburger Heaven from a former Empress employee. They noticed that the Cincinnati chili was outselling the hamburgers on their menu and changed the restaurant's name to Gold Star Chili. As of 2015^[update], Skyline (with over 130 locations) and Gold Star (with 89 locations) were the largest Cincinnati chili parlor chains, while Empress had only two remaining locations, down from over a dozen during the chain's most successful period.